20

Kat

Low winter sun bounces off the mirrors her father would use to manipulate the light in the studio. Kat can’t help but wonder if he’s still using shiny things – talk of heavy metals in his hair, Rock Point’s refurb, a Las Vegas wedding – to distract their attention from murkier matters or, worse, further ‘announcements’ to come. Searching for the nude sketch that had so ruffled him, she tugs the lowest cabinet drawer again. Locked. Damn. Was it a nude of Dixie, one he’s feeling too upset to share? Only that wouldn’t tally with the date – 1980: Dixie was mid-eighties – or the panicked urgency of his snatch.

Kat’s mobile shatters the studio’s hush, piercing her thoughts. Is her phone always this loud? How does she bear it? The bloody lawyer. Again. On a Saturday as well. She flicks it to voicemail. Her left leg starts to move, her trainer sole rhythmically scuffing on the floorboards.

Quite a few calls to return now. And she can’t face any of them. Even ignoring the capricious signal – she needs a satellite phone, like a deep-sea trawlerman – Rock Point is a vortex, messing with her head, slowing the tickertape rush of her thoughts. The constant crash of the waves has become a numbing, hypnotic white noise that makes Spring’s data – click-through, engagement, advertising revenue – seem oddly meaningless, a spray of digits, not the patterns she can read faster than anyone else. She needs to get her shit together. Her priorities straight.

A run might help. Just her, pitted against Strava and the universe, all breath and thrust, legs like pistons. Another black coffee. And a garage that’s open and able to fix Angie’s bust car. Yes. So they can wave her off into a treacherous blizzard. Dad can love whom he likes – he always has, with extravagant abandon. But marrying? No. Just no. Marrying brings ugly inheritance issues. And not just of Rock Point. There’s his art collection, his Soho flat and large east London studio. Possibly other boomer treasures – stocks, investments – squirrelled away and forgotten. If he marries and then dies before changing his will, Angie will get the lot. Likely Angie, no fool, knows this, and will not be shooing him into his solicitor’s dusty Marylebone office anytime soon. Flora is naively certain Dad will sort it out, and says he’s recently muttered a couple of times about ‘needing to update’ his will. But Kat can sniff out fiscal disorder, and this has a pungent whiff. Her father’s affairs have always teetered on the edge of chaos, life’s admin of no interest. And she’s not sure he’d even care if he did leave a steaming legal mess behind. Still. It’d be too inflammatory to dive into the touchy subject of inheritance with Angie still at Rock Point. For this reason alone, she could throttle the person who screwed that tyre, delaying her departure.

And why target Angie? She can’t work out why Angie’s scruffy Kia was picked over Flora’s ostentatious SUV, or Dad’s distinctive yellow Porsche (The Blonde, Kat’s mother witheringly calls it). Someone local – the note-writer, presumably – must have nursed vengeful thoughts about Angie in the corner of their mind all these years. With that lurid flume of hair, she’s instantly recognizable.

The police should be called. But Angie refused: ‘I don’t want them involved!’ she’d said, appalled, like some sort of gangster’s moll. Dad agreed with her, channelling the nonchalance of Cockney friends who’d long ago swapped lives of crime for arts club notoriety, insisting the ‘Keystone Cops’ wouldn’t be interested at this time of year anyway. Kat suspects he’s secretly worried about jogging a local policeman’s memory. Disturbing old ground.

Speaking of which … She presses her hipbones against the trestle table and opens a thick sketchbook. Hearing the click of the studio door, she whips around.

Lauren looks just as surprised to see Kat. Her dark gaze slides to the sketchbook in Kat’s hands. ‘What’s up?’

Kat feels guilty and faintly ludicrous, searching for some random old sketch. Chasing shadows from the past. Better not to mention it. She doesn’t want Lauren to think she’s snooping – there’s a possibility she might tell Dad – and she doesn’t want to add to Lauren’s hefty psychological load either. Her sister is delicate enough right now. Yes, she’ll keep it to herself. If in doubt, say nothing. ‘Just checking out Dad’s roof-repair funds.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Unquestioningly swallowing this line, Lauren pads over in socks, bringing a waft of salt and earth, smells Kat remembers carrying back to her mother’s Notting Hill flat years ago, like the gritty sand in her shoes and straggly sun-bleached hair that smelt of bonfires and sea. On her first days back in London – the city revving into September, new school shoes, new starts – Kat refused to wash, not wanting to lose that last bit of freedom and summer. Not wanting to grow up again.

‘Lauren, tell me.’ Kat folds over another page, sending a mite scurrying. ‘Isn’t it reckless to have left all these drawings here?’

‘Totally. It’s too damp and they should be properly archived.’ Lauren picks up two stray dried-out brushes from the table and slips them into a battered metal pot, neatening the place, just as she did as a girl.

In the studio, their sibling power balance always did turn on its head. Lauren had an assurance in this room she didn’t elsewhere in the house. And it was her opinion their father sought here, as though her unconventional childhood – or, more likely, Dixie’s influence, Dixie’s genes – gave her a prized perspective. Kat and Flora had resented her for this. They’d also tried to crush it, Kat realizes, with a jolt of shame. Behind Lauren’s back, they’d called her ‘the studio pixie’.

Kat points to a drawing. ‘What do you think?’ she asks uncertainly, deferring to her sister. ‘To my hopelessly untrained eye, works in progress?’ A torso, just a few lines. A doodle really. ‘Half finished?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ Lauren tilts her head on one side. ‘Life model sketches. Or studies for a bigger work.’

‘Oh, okay. What do I know?’ Kat thinks of the muddy-grey blank spaces that often surround figures in his portraits, or coalesce in corners. Negative space, Dad calls it, as important as any sitter. A lot of the stuff in Girls and Birdcage, as if there was something he couldn’t quite portray or resolve. ‘His paintings always look kind of unfinished to me too.’

‘If an artist says a work is finished, it’s finished.’ The smile in Lauren’s eyes catches the petrol-blue shimmer of sunlight. ‘Picasso once said, “To finish a work is to kill it.”’

‘Ha. I’ll use that line at the shareholder meeting.’

Lauren laughs and Kat thinks what a wonderful laugh it is, bigger than you’d expect from her frame.

Another sketchbook: she turns its pages carefully. ‘It’s a bit like rifling through Dad’s head. Or bed.’ Wrong thing to say. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean Dixie …’ Kat blunders. ‘You know what I mean. I’ll stop now. So, is this stuff any good?’

‘Yep,’ Lauren replies, without hesitation.

‘Worth something?’ She wishes she could put a figure on it.

‘Definitely,’ Lauren says, distractedly, head on one side, more interested in the drawings.

‘Here. Take this.’ Kat closes the sketchbook and presses it into Lauren’s hands. ‘Before Angie does.’

‘Oh, no, I can’t take it.’ Lauren looks baffled.

‘Dad said take anything you like.’

Lauren places the sketchbook down again. ‘Not these.’

‘You, out of all of us, you deserve it,’ she says, possibly too forcefully, as if emotional debts from childhood can be repaid materially. The holes stuffed with sketches and banknotes. ‘No one would blame you if you left early either,’ she adds, trying to be kind, making it worse. ‘This must be a nightmare for you. Angie. The parrot …’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Lauren says quietly. ‘Mum made me promise to reach out to my Finch family after she’d died.’ Her voice wavers slightly, grief bubbling beneath it. ‘Dad’s invite felt like a sign.’

‘Okay,’ Kat says, trying extremely hard not to sound sceptical. But life is about cause and effect, action and reaction, mysteries being unusual events without analysis. One of her favourite throwaway quips is that everything, ultimately, is code. Knowing it’d be a horribly insensitive thing to say at that moment makes an awful part of Kat want to say it. Decimate everything. Edging away from the delicate, intimate turn of the conversation, she takes her phone out of her pocket and rolls her eyes. ‘Work calls,’ she says, with a small excusing groan.

But Lauren just stands there, refusing to take the hint. A loaded silence presses against them. Kat can sense what’s coming.

‘Kat, the eclipse summer …’ Lauren’s voice lowers, as if the words might crack on contact with the air.

A ripped blue ballgown; Gemma’s ‘Tuesday’ knickers; a black gunshot sun. ‘Oh, yeah?’ she says absently, her heart starting to hammer.

‘No one ever talks about it.’

‘Well, that’s the Finch family for you.’

Lauren picks at a hardened lump of glue on the table and explains that, in the days before she died, Dixie tried to tell her something important – some sort of secret – about that summer. Outside the window, gulls scream and wheel, and it feels as if they’re inside Kat’s skull.

‘But Mum lost her thread and drifted off,’ Lauren continues. ‘And I never found out what it was, this secret. Do you know?’

‘I just know what you know, sorry.’ She tries to sound neutral. But her voice comes out too high. ‘And what was in the newspaper.’

In the years afterwards, if a journalist ever dared ask Dad about it, he’d walk out of the interview. Eventually, the story ran out of oxygen. But, of course, it didn’t, Kat realizes. It’s still alive, and currently shuffling around the studio.

‘Kat?’ With perfect timing, Flora shouts from the bottom of the studio stairs. ‘Lauren? Are you up there?’

‘Yeah!’ she shouts back, relieved to be interrupted.

‘Kat, wait. Quickly, I need to show you something.’ Lauren reaches into the pocket of her combat trousers. ‘I should have mentioned it earlier, but I didn’t want to freak out Flora and …’

A thunder of footsteps. ‘Where’s Raff?’ Her face flushed, Flora bursts into the studio. ‘Please tell me he’s up here with you.’